Changes in the Gravitational Pull of Waterholes on Stone Age Hunter-Forager Settlement Patterns in a Semi-Desert Environment

在国家科学基金会的支持下，布里特·布斯曼博士和他的合作者将把手写的考古遗址数据转换成电子格式，并广泛提供给感兴趣的研究人员。十多年来，考古学家在位于南非中部高原卡鲁地区的Zeekoe山谷进行了调查和挖掘。约5，000平方米。人们徒步搜寻了2000公里长的灌木沙漠，绘制了遗址分布图，记录了从一百多万年前到近代在一个山谷中的重复占领。这是世界上关于史前狩猎采集者空间组织的最大可用数据。大约有15 000个地点以铅笔和纸的形式记录下来。在开展大部分工作时，还没有电子记录和分享数据的手段。因此，这一宝贵的数据库很难分析或共享，并有物理退化的危险。有了这个奖项，该团队将巩固整个Zeekoe山谷的记录，并将其转移到电子媒体。他们会：1.以地理信息系统的形式使数据更容易和更快地处理，这将在航空照片上覆盖每个测绘地点; 2.将记录的所有部分制成光盘，供所有感兴趣的学者查阅，从而鼓励合作者在自己对数据感兴趣的基础上开辟新的查询途径; 3.在互联网上向狩猎采集考古学和地理学等已经认识到需要此类数据库的领域的高等本科或研究生班的教育机构提供记录; 4.为将来类似的项目制定一项议定书; 5.考古学家希望了解技术简单的人类社会如何适应恶劣和不断变化的环境，以确定他们采用的生存和位置策略以及这些策略如何随着时间的推移而变化。要做到这一点，良好的分布信息是必不可少的，Zeekoe材料提供了一个无与伦比的数据库。电子档案将被人类学研究人员广泛使用。

With National Science Foundation support Dr. Britt Bousman and his collaborators will convert handwritten archaeological site data to an electronic format and make it widely available to interested researchers. For over a decade archaeologists have conducted survey and excavation in the Zeekoe Valley which is located in the upper Karoo region of South Africa's central plateau. Some 5,000 sq. km of scrub desert have been searched on foot to produce site distribution maps that document, in one valley, repeated occupations from over a million years ago to recent times. This is the largest available body of data on prehistoric hunter-gatherer spatial organization in the world. Approximately 15,000 individual sites have been recorded in pencil and paper format. At the time most of this work was conducted, means for electronically recording and sharing data were not available. Thus this valuable data base is difficult to analyze or share and is in danger of physical deterioration. With this award, the team will consolidate the entire Zeekoe Valley record and transfer it to electronic media. They will: 1. Render the data far more easily and rapidly manipulatable in a GIS format which will overlay each mapped site on an aerial photograph; 2. make the record fully accessible on CD-ROM in all its parts to all interested scholars, thus encouraging new avenues of enquiry beyond the collaborators own interests in the data; 3. make the record available on the Internet to educational institutions with upper level undergraduate or graduate classes in hunter-gatherer archaeology and geography, fields where there is already a perceived need for such data bases; 4. develop a protocol for similar projects in the future; 5. rescue extant documents from physical decay.Archaeologists wish to understand how human societies at technologically simple levels adapted to harsh and changing environments, to determine what subsistence and locational strategies they employed and how these changed over time. To do this, good distributional information is essential and the Zeekoe material provides an unparalleled data base. The electronic archive will be widely used by anthropological researchers.